Slashdot Mirror
Mars Rover "Spirit" In Danger
Riding with Robots writes "Just days after announcing that the Mars Phoenix Lander has met its icy demise, NASA reports that a dust storm has left the rover Spirit on the edge of power failure. During one recent Martian day, the robotic geologist's solar array produced only 89 watt hours of energy, the lowest output by either rover in their nearly five years on Mars. Mission managers are taking steps to protect the hardy, battle-worn spacecraft, but the agency describes Spirit's status as 'vulnerable.'"
This has required mission managers to shut down the dual graphics cards and switch to the integrated graphics. Really sad.
Secretly sabotaging all of our probes by use of their weather control system? Genius. I don't know how we'll ever be able to invade.
Can you really call a rover a "spacecraft"? That is kind of like dipping my car in the ocean and call it a boat.
It would be very sad to see Spirit run out of power, but honestly, both the rovers have performed so far beyond their original expectations, it's astounding. I seem to recall they were originally meant for something like a two-month mission...four years ago.
So if we do lose Spirit soon, for my part, I think we can be satisfied with what it's already accomplished.
Dan Aris
Fun. Free. Online. RPG. BattleMaster.
Spirit and Opportunity simply cannot be broken. I wouldn't worry about it.
Isn't this just an effect of reduced sunlight during winter? Or is Spirit near the equator / other hemisphere? I know the Phoenix shutdown is at least partly due to seasonal changes
From the Press Release:
"NASA's Phoenix Mars Lander has ceased communications
after operating for more than five months. As anticipated, seasonal
decline in sunshine at the robot's arctic landing site is not
providing enough sunlight for the solar arrays to collect the power
necessary to charge batteries that operate the lander's instruments."
The English word fart is one of the oldest words in the English vocabulary.
Now we're going to be hearing from the environmentalists about all this littering we're doing on another planet. I hear there is an organization forming called "Redpeace".
We figured out a long time ago that it's easier to elect seven judges than to elect 132 legislators.
Perhaps they should have included a 'solar cell wipper assembly' (Patent Pending) to wipe the dust off???
We can't allow it to fall into the hands of the damn Sandpeople.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
Looks like any future rovers should come equipped with windshield wipers.
Well I for one hope the rovers survive, Cornell would certainly be sad if either of them dies. As for the dust storms, there have been previous dust storms which have actually cleared off the solar panels which then allowed the rovers to produce more power. So if Spirit survives, it might be better for it.
Viking 1 - orbiter + lander - dead and dead (fuel leak, battery)
Viking 2 - orbiter + lander - dead and dead (out of gas, bad software update)
Pathfinder - lander - lost contact in 12 weeks.
Sojourner - rover - lost contact in 12 weeks.
Spirit - rover - critically low power, busted wheel
Opportunity - rover - still roving strong
Phoenix - rover - dead, but we're still listening
Indeed, Spirit can legitimately unfurl a "Mission Accomplished" banner, now.
And have no regrets about it.
Now we lost Dewey, too.
"Speaking the Truth in times of universal deceit is a revolutionary act." -- George Orwell
And give Spirit a 700 Billion dollar bailout..
It is official; NASA now confirms: The Spirit rover is dying
One more crippling bombshell hit the already beleaguered Mars exploration community when NASA confirmed that the rover's power level has dropped yet again, now down to less than a fraction of 1 percent. Coming close on the heels of the recent Phoenix Lander failure, this news serves to reinforce what we've known all along. The Spirit is collapsing in complete disarray, as fittingly exemplified by a story on Slashdot regarding its power failures.
You don't need to be a Kreskin to predict the Spirit rover's future. The hand writing is on the wall: the Spirit rover faces a bleak future. In fact there won't be any future at all for the Spirit rover because the Spirit rover is dying. Things are looking very bad for the Spirit rover. As many of us are already aware, the Spirit rover continues to lose power. Machine oil flows like a river of blood.
Let's keep to the facts and look at the numbers.
NASA states that there are 89 watt hours of energy. How much energy is required each day? Let's see. There are heaters including one that protects a science instrument, the miniature thermal emission spectrometer, as well as communications equipment. Now NASA has had to switch all these off.
Due to the troubles of metric/imperial conversion and so on, the Beagle Probe crashed and attention was taken over by the Phoenix Lander. Now the Phoenix Lander is also dead, its corpse turned over to yet another rusting hulk.
All major surveys show that the Spirit rover has steadily declined in power. the Spirit rover is very sick and its long term survival prospects are very dim. The Spirit rover continues to decay. Nothing short of a Martians with batteries could save the Spirit rover from its fate at this point in time. For all practical purposes, the Spirit rover is dead.
If you haven't made a developer cry, you've wasted a day.
This was a triumph
I'm making a note here: ====HUGE SUCCESS====
It's hard to overstate my satisfaction
It's hard to overstate
My satisfaction.
Aperture Science;
We do what we must,
Because we can.
For the good of all of us.
Except the ones who are dead.
But there's no sense crying
Over every mistake.
You just keep on trying
Till you run out of cake.
And the science gets done,
And you make a neat gun
For the people who are
Still alive.
I'm not even angry...
I'm being so sincere right now -
Even though you broke my heart,
And killed me.
And tore me to pieces.
And threw every piece into a fire.
As they burned it hurt because
I was so happy for you!
Now, these points of data
Make a beautiful line.
And we're out of BETA.
We're releasing on time!
So I'm GLaD, I got burned -
Think of all the things we learned -
For the people who are
Still alive.
(Go ahead and leave me...)
(I think I'd prefer to stay inside...)
(Maybe you'll find someone else
To help you?)
Maybe Black Mesa?
That was a joke! HAHA! FAT CHANCE!
Anyway this cake is great!
It's so delicious and moist!
Look at me; still talking
When there's science to do!
When I look out there,
It makes me GLaD I'm not you.
I've experiments to run.
There is research to be done,
On the people who are
Still alive.
And believe me I am
Still alive.
I'm doing science and I'm
Still alive.
I feel fantastic and I'm
Still alive.
While you're dying I'll be
Still alive.
And when you're dead I will be
Still alive.
Still alive.
Still alive.
This has been discussed to death on Slashdot several times over the years.
considering that my dishwasher back on Earth only lasted 3. I wouldn't have expected their lander to last for that long.
1. An 89 watt-hour high-speed dash to blow the dust off. By my calculations they should be able to go 6 feet at 4 mph so ok forget that.
2. Launch a nuclear powered feather dusting support rover. No that's stupid.
3. Fire a kazillajoule laser at Mars to energize the solar panels. This is actually the least worst idea so far which is depressing.
4. Spend the remaining energy teaching the rover to do the Hammer Dance with it's eight independently swiveling wheels. If you got to go down, go down doing the Hammer Dance that's what I always say which is maybe why nobody sits with me in the cafeteria.
Equine Mammals Are Considerably Smaller
Why didn't NASA include a device similar to windshield wipers on the solar panels? It seems that they knew mars was dusty, and it would be a simple thing to add (I'd imagine).
You'd be wrong. You can find the details in the hundreds of posts on the subject over the last years, in short they figured more scientific equipment would be more valuable.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
This has been covered before... Anyway, here's the deal: 1.) The wiper would add weight and cost. 2.) The wiper would require power. 3.) The wiper would eventually wear out. 4.) The wiper might get stuck mid-"wipe", blocking the solar energy incident on the panels. 5.) The wiper would scratch the surface of the solar panel, reducing the amount of absorbed light. Either 4 or 5 would reduce the amount of power generated.
These things had a 90 day life span! Next time I think we should send them in pairs so they can help each other out in a pinch.
And there are too many factors that would have made wipers impractical especially for what was originally a 90 sol mission.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
We must decrease our carbon footprint on Mars! These devices have started failing from dust storms only recently, since we have been sending robots to Mars.
So it is obviously our robots that are causing the increased storms!
end sarcasm...
That's what I do when my iPhone battery gets low anyway.
Danger, Will Robinson!
The most Illustrious Council of Elders has issued an update following yesterday's Planetary Day of Celebration of Victory over the Northern Invader. K'breel, Speaker for the Council, spake thus:
When a newly-hired journalism intern implied a correlation between the invaders' movements and seasonal weather patterns, and pointed out that that the current sandstorm had begun to abate, and that the same winds that were promised to bury invaders in dust could also, on occasion, blow accumulated dust off the invaders, K'Breel, in a rare display of compassion, responded by offering him a piece of jerky made from the dried gelsacs of a recently-retired member of the Press Corps.
I got modded "troll" once for calling them that once, but the fact is they were designed for six month's use. They've been rolling around Mars for five years now. That's like an automobile with a ten year warrantee still running after fifty years without maintenance - in other words, a hooptie. It's not a slam, in this case it's a compliment.
I wish the guys who engineered the rovers would engineer cars. The rovers are simply amazing.
Free Martian Whores!
Note to self: one cosmic feather-duster...
When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro. ~~ Hunter S. Thompson
It's a funny thing...these little machines have done the job they were designed and built to do, done it well, and while I know they're expensive versions of RC cars, there's a part of me that will be sad when they stop working.
Learn to spell: nickel, missile, lose, solely, amendment, speech, kernel, probably, ridiculous, deity, hierarchy, versus
The Planetary Society blog has a composite picture of Spirit from two years ago and today which shows starkly just how much dust has accumulated.
Maybe, just maybe, if we all wish hard enough the wind will blow some of the dust off the panels and the rovers can go on making the people who developed them look brilliant and foolish all at the same time.
it's about time, aint it?
It's fall in the northern hemisphere of Mars where Phoenix is located, so it dying was entirely expected, and although it lasted longer than its mission, they were hoping to get a few more weeks out of it. Landing was just a month before the summer solstice, so it had 30 days of conditions that started good and improved, then 130 days of declining conditions. Since it's in the arctic circle, it had complete daylight until a month or two ago, when the sun started setting again.
Spirit and Opportunity, however, are in the southern hemisphere, and it's early spring. Between the dust on Spirit's solar panels and being about 12 degrees further from the equator than Opportunity, things got a little worrisome for Spirit over the winter, but her minimum power levels at that time were over twice the 89 Watt-hours quoted in the article.
Low power is slightly less of a concern now than it was then, because the surface temperature should be higher and so electronics should need less heating, but that huge drop in power is probably more than enough to make up the difference. The other potential positive factor is Spirit's batteries had a decent level of charge when the storm started, so if the storm dissipates quickly they'll probably be in the clear. Trying to maintain 89 W-hr for several months, however, could very easily be fatal, so they're trying to use an absolute minimum of power to keep her out of fault mode.
Spirit actually hadn't moved an inch for several months to save power until a week or two ago. Her team had parked her on a sloped rock face at about a 30 degree angle to square her solar panels to the noon sun over the winter, and because of relatively clear skies, she was even able to take a high resolution panorama (link is to an index, not directly to the giant 42 MB image) and do some stationary science. As the sun angle increased, they had just started inching back towards a 20 degree tilt to follow it when the dust storm hit. There's a rather dramatic picture of what that 30 degree tilt looks like on the program site.
As of the last report I've seen, the atmosphere is 69% opaque due to suspended dust (although I believe more than 31% of the sunlight diffuses through indirectly), and the dust coating on Spirit's solar panels is only letting through 32% of of the sunlight that actually reaches them. In the past they'd had good luck with winds cleaning the panels off, but that hasn't happened in a while. The team is hoping that the same seasonal weather that brings on these dust storms will generate a few lucky dust devils.
Opportunity, on the other side of the planet meanwhile, has been getting 500-600 Watt-hours and averaging about 50 meters per day of progress towards the huge crater Endeavor, which is 12 km away.
And what nutjob modded the parent as a troll? Sheesh! And to think we probably let that person vote, too.
Spirit has not been moving much recently - I believe that since 2007 it has only gone about 1 or 2 meters. It's not just the power, it's also the crippled wheel.
What the spacecraft needs is a few dust-devils to blow the dust off. The original mission plan assumed that both rovers would suffer power failures after a few months due to dust, and people were pleasantly surprised to have the dust cleared off by the dust-devils. Why this is no longer working is unclear, at least to me - the climate may be changing, or maybe the spacecraft has acquired a static electricity charge.
Can't they just get the gaffer to wipe it off?
Isn't that what they usually do when making movies.
Not to mention 6.) It likely wouldn't be fantastically effective given the "super static cling" effect of the dust they're dealing with.
upon the advice of my lawyer, i have no sig at this time
ZOMG! There are footprints in the upper left corner!
In Soviet Russia meme tires of you!
Spirit got the election results and is committing suicide. Spirit was a big Palin fan.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
The two rovers were not designed to work for 90 days.
They were guaranteed to work for 90 days.
The various components were designed to work no matter what they experienced for 90 days on the Martian surface.
I suspect that they were designed for the worst possible set of circumstances for 90 days which has allowed them to operate for the much longer time in the actual environment which is more benign than the worst case scenario.
Regardless of the semantics of the 90 days, the time the two robots have been operating is still an amazing achievement and everybody involved should be very proud.
myke
Mimetics Inc. Twitter
Suggestion for next rover, a $5 broom attachment.
It is by the juice of the coffee bean that thoughts acquire speed, the teeth acquire stains. The stains become a warning
During a day, solar panels don't produce any watts of energy. Watts are a compound unit, specifically joules per second. Joules are a measurement of energy, and what would be produced in a a time period. Watts represent the instantaneous rate of power generation.
Perhaps they should have included a 'solar cell wipper assembly' (Patent Pending) to wipe the dust off???
No, there's probably already a patent on it, and then you'd have hoards of lawyers descending upon Marshall, TX, to stop the rover from using it, so it'd die anyway.
... unless the Martians have their own patent docket... oh no, do you suppose the rovers are now violating any Martian patents??!? So they're dead either way.
DT
Is this thing on? Hello?
I can tell by the pixels.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
Centurion: Has what sir?
Pilate: Spiwit!
Centurion: Yes, he did sir.
Pilate: No, no. Spiwit, siw. Um, bwavado. A touch of dewwing-do.
Centurion: Oh. Ahh, about eleven, sir.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
TFS refers to watt hours
Watt = joule / sec
Watt hours = Watts * hours, not Watts / hour
1 watt hour = 3600 joules
Portal was simultaneously awesome and hilarious. But copy-pasting the credits song in a post with "martian" in the title is lame.
Or they could have thrown the power budget out the window and used a nuclear-decay power source, like a lot of satellites do.
Now that -power availability- seems to be the biggest issue with these landers, maybe we can build one with a power source that provides years of solid performance instead of solar panels.
The devices wouldn't even be radioactive by the Mars gets crowded anyway.
"Sometimes, I think Trent just needs a cup of hot chocolate and a blankie." -Tori Amos on Nine Inch Nails
Wow. Mod this guy down for unnecessary, offtopic, and way overused joke. I'm AC because I'm scared of the mods.
If there ever was a monument to the capabilities of the human mind and spirit, these two rovers qualify. Could you imagine taking your grandkids to the Smithsonian and saying, "I remember when these worked so well they outperformed all expectations. Just like Lindberghs plane, only better.
There is the small problem of getting them back, as far as I know FedEx is a few years off from a space port and a Mars zip code.
Woulda been easier to have just sent up an Energizer Bunny... "It keeps GOING. And GOING. And GOING..."
And, it's lightweight. It might even serve as a deterrent to any Martians having designs of attacking the Earth.
Previously: "Linux... Toward the Sunrise..." Now: "Linux... Toward the-- No, now, part of Every Sunrise"
Oh well, maybe the next rover will have something like this.
The next rover is going to have a nuclear battery. No more sissy photovoltaics. No more patient waiting for the feeble wind to blow in just the right direction. Just RAW, NUCLEAR POWER.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
They need to make a Roomba that can vacuum the dust off the solar panels. Or put a whisk on a articulated arm or something. Amazing lifespan these things, but imagine if they had just been able to clear their own dust off instead of hoping for a windstorm to blow them clean.
NASA's next rover, the Mars Science Laboratory, is going to use an RTG capable of generating 2.5 kilowatt-hours a day, which is around four times what the current rovers can produce on a good day.
Of course the MSL is about twice as long and more than five times as heavy as Spirit and Opportunity, and more than twice as heavy as Phoenix. So it's much more expensive not just to build but to get to Mars, and more complicated to land since air-bags won't work. Weight is the main reason the Spirit is stuck with solar cells.
The MSL is a much more ambitious project. Which is great, because you're absolutely right nuclear power is way better than solar, no problems with dust or night time or winter. The wikipedia article says the new RTG should last at least 14 years. If the rest of the rover is built as well as the current ones, we could have the MSL running around Mars for a long, long time. Oh, and since it's going to need a snappier name, I suggest "Optimus" (and if they decide to send two, of course "Prime").
The enemies of Democracy are
The atmosphere is so thin that blowing compressed air would probably be better. The choice would probably be between pre-packed air or a compressor motor with a buffer. Pre-packed air may be a simpler and lighter design, but provide less air blasts. It seems about 2 blasts per Earth year was sufficient for the rovers (as whirlwinds on Mars) based on panel photos over time. Thus, if a mission could last up to 8 years, then pre-pack 16 blasts' worth.
Table-ized A.I.
Anything mechanical would add weight, jam or burn out, consume more power, scratch the glass on the solar panels, or make the dust stick to the glass even more. The risks made were worse than the potential gains.
Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads
All I have to say is that I am now dis-Spirit-ed. I hope you Martian dust storms are happy. (/Sulks)
.. paranoid crackpot leftover from the days of Amiga.
Drug rehabilitation (often drug rehab or just rehab) is an umbrella term for the processes of medical and/or psychotherapeutic treatment, for dependency on psychoactive substances such as alcohol, prescription drugs, and so-called street drugs such as cocaine, heroin or amphetamines.
=================
Kyle
http://www.legalx.net
That timeline was based on the idea that the panels would be unusable due to dust buildup. Circular reasoning, anyone?
NASA put people on the moon with a tin can and a few thousand transistors. Anyone who thinks the engineers couldn't have come up with a solution to remove dust from solar panels on Mars that would be practical and cost-effective over a multi-year mission timeline is insane.
The lack of a cleaning mechanism doesn't reflect the unique challenges of the Martian environment, it reflects only the horrific mismanagement of the space program since Apollo.
It's not circular reasoning; it's called scope. Both rovers had 90 sol mission and objectives that lasted that long. So the rovers were designed to last at least 90 sols under the worst conditions. When they looked at this problem originally (from what they learned from other Mars missions), they had 2 choices: Specifically design something to remove the dust or design the rover so that it would last at least 90 sols without cleaning. They choose the later due to the weight/space/power limitations. Also adding a dust removal system may have meant the loss of scientific equipment. I'm sure if they were designing for a 5 year mission, the design parameters and choices would have been different. NASA has long know that the dust would mean the death of the rovers; they designed to rovers so that the death would be beyond 90 sols. Lasting 5 years has been a huge bonus.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.